Having more than a passing interest in history this book jumped out at me as part of a peruse of the interweb. Meso-American and Andean cultures seem to be something many people are interested in, but finding books that move past the usual tropes are hard to find.

Mann really lifts the game in relation to enabling greater understanding of what the Americas were like before European intrusion, primarily by addressing the greater myths and demolishing them in order. The concern with this type of book is that the mythbusting can sometimes stray far too close to explanations that end in “because aliens”. For example, “how could nomadic, semi-conscious tribes build the step pyramids?” Answer – aliens did it.

1491 uses the latest research to demonstrate that the Americas were home to a succession of advanced urban civilisations, demolishes the “population by land-bridge” argument, undermines the “Western wilderness” fallacy, and brings a detailed, but not obsessively undue amount of attention to the scale and number of cultures displaced by Europeans.

As we move further and further away from the decade that was the War on Terror it becomes easier to view the madness as an aberration, and harder to view the surveillance state legacy as something normal. Personally, this difficulty is compounded by my experience of being a 20-something in the golden decade of freedom that followed the end of the Cold War and the long peace it delivered for most.

Incendiary is set at the edge of our current surveillance state, with a terrorist bombing profoundly effecting change in the life of our highly nervous protagonist. The cascade of events comes fast, and sweeps up the characters in a colossal and irresistible wave of action and reaction.

What I liked most about the novel was the incredible likability of the main character, and, in fact the characters in general. The people are in equal measures both human and unbelievably inhumane, a bizarre mishmash of the profoundly beautiful and intensely ugly condensed almost effortlessly. You find yourself both understanding and despising some characters in equal measure, and all are inclined to work their way under your skin.

Recommended for: any occasion. Light enough to read on a plane, but deep enough to compel you to switch off the idiot box and read instead.

Ganymede is apparently the fourth book in a series, and I think I may have made a mistake reading it. While on the whole Cherie writes very well, this novel reads like an appendix to whatever books came before it.

The story revolves around New Orleans and two characters apparently drawn from the Priest’s earlier novels. They need to rescue a new bit of tech, a ‘submarine’, from the evil clutches of the Texan army and deliver it to the Union, thereby potentially ending the war. But! Before this can happen there are zombies to battle, sneakiness to be sneaked, and some of the most disjointed action you’ve ever read to tackle.

As I say, Priest writes well. I connected with the characters almost immediately, and bought into the altiverse she proposes. But the plot and story itself are disconnected, haphazard, and most probably churned out by an author who has moved into the “words per day per hour and let’s make money” stage of their career. I think that if she’s taken time to read back over what she’d written, and perhaps actually turn it into a coherent narrative, this might actually have been a great read, instead of an OK one.

I think we’ll all need to agree that steampunk is now approaching its use-by date. I’m not meaning this in spiteful way, more that steampunk has settled into that comfortable middle-age of genres – there are still just enough newbies out there who don’t think it’s old hat yet, but in itself it’s widening around the middle and becoming all-too-predictable.

So let’s compare it to true sci-fi. Back in the 1950s science fiction was brand-spanking new. It was crazy aliens, rockets, flying cars and keen-as-beans astronauts. Today it’s pretty much settled into a series of familiar tropes. Things like warp drives and hyperdrives, giant spaceships and wars with unknown powers. The genre is driven best by people who understand things tech, and 9 times out of 10 you’ll be getting the same old space opera with inter-changeable characters and predictable narrative.

And there we say welcome to The Falling Machine. While Meyer writes well, this is pretty familiar stuff with ever-so-slight twists on steampunk canon. I’d recommend it for reading on a holiday, or perhaps on the bus.

I persevered with this book because the author is a Kiwi and I wanted give him a fair go, but for the life of me I’m still not entirely sure what in the hell Burnt Ice is. And that fact pretty much sums the novel up.

This is a spoiler alert.

I’m suspicious that burnt ice refers to a period the crew spend inside a comet travelling between star systems. The galling thing is that the chain of events that get them to this point are strange. Wheeler has an impressive imagination, but the plot of this novel is non-existent. The chapters are a series of vignettes strung together without any real semblance of continuity, the characters appallingly one-dimensional, and the emphasis almost exclusively placed on “nifty ideas” that are sprinkled through the pages like leavening.

As an example, the first chapter or so is centred on introducing a critical, all important star system that our soldier heroes are transported to. So far, so good. But then, as if out of the blue this base is assaulted by sentient squid that are barely mentioned except as back-drop for the remainder of the “story”. This leaves the reader asking, “wtf?”, “where did they come from?”, “what was their beef with the humans?”, “if they’re attacking us, are they the bad guys?”, and “why did a couple of them sample the tissue of one of our characters, but this is never used in the story?”. The entire chapter could have been dispensed with and covered with the line, “after the attack of the squidlings was repulsed, they sent some heroes out to the galaxy to get answers.”

And… that pretty much sums up the whole novel. Where there should be action, there is a paragraph and we’re done. Where there should be tech that makes up the background and adds colour to the story, we have extended descriptions and pointless blather.

Remember that feeling when you walked out of the Phanton Menance, and thought, what… the fuck… has Lucas done to me… and the great Star Wars was forever ”made dirty’ somehow?

This film was as bad as that feeling.

So awful…

To put this newfound drive to type into context, let’s take a step back for a second and think about The Hobbit the children’s story. This timeless tale has a what can perhaps accurately be described as a “middle-class” chap living by himself. I say middle class because he’s well-off, but not ostentatiously so. He’s soft-handed, literate, and gentile. THEN! Into his comfortable life intrudes a wizard and a mess of bumbling dwarves. These interlopers weave a tales of an unknown and terrible evil resident on the other side of the freaking world, and somehow, miraculously, this wee man finds himself on an adventure to defeat it.

In a nutshell, it’s awesome. The hobbit finds himself up against all kinds of unknown horrors, fighting and fleeing in turn, and all the while being sheparded by Gandalf the Grey. The dwarves are hopeless, and constantly getting themselves in untold troubles. But, somehow, it all ends up OK. The wee hobbit proves himself to be something of a hero, and everyone pulls through.

Now… Peter Jackson takes this timeless tale, one that I loved as a child, and does cynical, unspeakable things to it. The tale is distorted, which you expect in a screenplay, but distorted to the point that it has an only passing resemblance to the mood and myth of the original book. In a way, he has taken this piece of my childhood, and twisted and wrung every last drop of blood from it, with every microgram of that blood being converted to cash for his masters at Time Warner. This charming, subtle tale becomes an empty vessel, a simulacrim of a story; a bombastic, over-directed, ham-fisted, over-and-just-plain-poorly-acted, overproduced, awkward, frankenstein of a movie that is little more than an excuse to drape scenery against a cinema screen.

And somehow, hidden within this 3 hour abomination of a movie are some gems. The scene in which Bilbo contests with Gollum is fantastic. Gollum is incredibly engaging, scarey and sympathy-inducing all in one. The Goblin King is actually not so bad.

But the rest… the rest is nothing less than outright ridiculous.

Some specifics:

The Dragon. Smaug is, as stated, an unknown evil. A tale to scare children at night. The story leaves this monster until the very end, when our hero must face it entirely alone. The story arc is a slow climb to meet this immense horror. But… BOOM! There he is in the very first scene. One great-big fuck-off dragon right there. Ignore that the back story of the dwarves should be something of a mystery. Ignore that their true natures should be gradually revealled. No. Just drag that money shot right out front, because that’s what will keep the punters coming back for another 6 hours of this unadulterated tripe.

The Dwarves. One of these doesn’t even look like a dwarf. In fact, he just looks like a short, handsome bloke like one you’d see slightly over dressed in town. The remainder scale all the way upwards from what a cartoon dwarf should look like, to a dude with nothing more than a groucho marx nose, to a King who looks nothing at all like his father or grandfather. Then there’s them all being kick-arse warriors. Seriously, what? Half the time their goofing off being swept up by trolls or falling through walls, and the rest they’re performing feats of magical strength against Orcs than weren’t actually in the book.

Radagast the Brown. What can only be described as the pod-race of this embarrassment of a film.

The White Orc. The most impossibly gratuitous character in the history of cinema. The sole reason this albino freak exists is to drag out the length of this movie, and eventually enable Time Warner – and Jackson – to make more fucking money. He adds nothing to the story. Nothing. Nada. Zip. There are some scenes with his running about and doing things – even the back-story on Thorin Oakenshield is tenuous at best – but mostly he’s a great big critter running around in daylight when every Tolkien Fanbois worth his mithril knows that ORCS DON’T GO OUT IN THE DAY. And the fanbois are what this abortion of a film is supposed to be about.

AND HE’S A FUCKING ALBINO. AN ALBINO ORC. AND HE DOESN’T HAVE LOTION ON. The burns must be terrible.

The scenery. I know the intention was to showcase some New Zealand, but… in one scene where the company is running from the impossible outdoors orcs the cast runs through something like 3 entirely separate bits of scenery-featuring-rocks. They don’t even resemble one another except in passing… and this is all over the space of a few hundred metres at most. It’s crazy…

The soundtrack. Good lord I was glad I wasn’t in an actual cinema being bombarded with that crap. So, so, suicide-inducingly-awful. It was like someone locked a small symphony in a smaller room, and wouldn’t let them out until they made something, anything. A testiment to an attempt to make this dog bark.

But, it was very pretty.

And that’s about it. I say don’t see this film. Don’t go to the cinema and piss away >$20. Don’t hire it from the video store. Don’t talk about it with friends because you’ll get “that look”.

My advice? Someone told me once not to give money to bad buskers, and don’t clap for unfunny comedians, because it’s like giving bread to seagulls: you only encourage shit. If you really must see this “then borrow it from a friends collection”. The studio doesn’t deserve a cent more money that what New Zealand has already given them.

Herd stood on a low ridge overlooking the chaos in the Ocker’s camp and waited. The slingers and archers were harrying the Ocker pickets, running in to loose stones or arrows then darting up and away. The Older Man wondered if it had always been like this. This love for war men have. The friendships blood-soaked battle engendered. He wondered if the Younger Man would make it through the day unscarred and unscathed. Indeed he wondered if he himself would.

He’d seen war in his own youth, when the Ockers turned from trade to piracy and the coasts became unsafe for man or beast. He remembered the cadence of the small battles and the terrifying, glorious thrill of it. He remembered the exaltation of throwing the Ockers back into the sea and the sand soaked red and rust for weeks. The endless tales of exploits and bravery of the Herd in the face of the Ocker terror, of dodging great war axes that split shields and arms like kindling, of luring Ockers into traps to be crushed with boulders, or to fall in pits. The joy of surviving the onslaught.

And he remembered the endless biting hunger, and the starvation when the crops couldn’t be brought in, or were burned. And the death of kin and kind. And what they had to do to survive.

Yes, men had always loved war. And always would. Because despite the misery, the heartache, the horror; moments like this enthralled generation after generation.

He pulled his helmet lower on his brow. The men had started to chant. “Hah! Hah! Hah!” their weapons knocking their shields, or knocking spears and spear-throwers. The blood was rising. The Ockers would be gone soon.

Parker stepped from the crowd, raised his arms for silence and the Herd obeyed, the gathering roar dropping to the occasional shout. He points to a Tawa Man who steps forward, two poles raised in the air, a head spiked on each. The Tawa Man drives the poles into the ground, the grisly tongues of the heads lolling towards the camp on the beach.

“Men of the Herd!!” He shouts, “They came again! The murderers came again! Came to take your children! Came for raping and murder! Came for our crops, or stock! Come to kill us all!” He pauses, “Will we let them take it?!”

The Herd roars its dissent, a hundred voices raises to shout abuse at the Ockers, who seeing the threat are gathering in the front of their ships, a short line forming, a wall of shields. Parker raises his arms again.

“We are Men of the Herd!” shouts Parker, his voice rising to fever pitch, “We remember! We remember that THEY are the children of the Lying God! THEY are the children of Deniers! THEY lit that fires that drowned the World! THEY brought the death to us!”

The Herd roars again, men stepping forward to charge the Ockers, barely restrained by Parkers hold on them. He raises his spear, points to the sky, his eyes wild with anger, bloodshot, his body quivering with rage, “IS THIS LIFE?!” he bellows

“IT IS DEATH!” The Herd screams, the men are shaking, waving spears, holding shields above their heads.